Top 10 Stories

Two Saskatchewan Cancer Agency employees who breached the privacy of 48 patients have been disciplined. The cancer agency learned of the privacy breaches on May 13 and 19-21 from other employees, and began a detailed inquiry. The investigation revealed that over a six-month period, two employees had viewed health information of 48 individuals for whom they were not caring. The information viewed included an individual’s name, address, phone number, date of birth, health services number...

Public-private threat intelligence sharing partnerships are increasingly common, and it turns out that most IT executives within critical infrastructure organizations see a need for them—especially as threats continue to snowball, to the point of potentially leading to casualties. A full 86% in a recent survey from the Aspen Institute and Intel Security said that such partnerships are key to keeping pace with escalating cybersecurity threats. Interestingly, most see improvements in cybersecurity over the last three...

Microsoft has released an out-of-band patch that addresses a critical, remotely exploitable flaw in all versions of Windows. The vulnerability stems from how Windows’ Adobe Type Manager Library handles specially-crafted OpenType fonts. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of the affected system. From there, the bad actor could then install programs; view, change or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. There are multiple ways an attacker...

Hackers linked to Russia who penetrated the computer networks of the White House and the State Department have turned their sights on the Pentagon, The Daily Beast has learned. And this time the hackers are using more sophisticated technologies that make them exceptionally hard to detect and that allow them to cover their tracks. The Daily Beast obtained an email notice that the Defense Department sent Friday warning “at least five” DOD computer users have...

Hackers are attempting to break into US Government agencies using a recently patched Adobe Flash vulnerability, the FBI is warning. The attacks target flaw CVE-2015-5119 revealed and patched earlier this month that can if exploited allow attackers to run malware on victim machines. The agency warned of the attacks which began 8 July in a memo (alert A-000062-PH) CSO reported. "The FBI has received information regarding a likely ongoing phishing campaign that started 08 July...

The Army National Guard has exposed the personal information of more than 850,000 current and former members, by improperly handling a data transfer. The servicemen and women may have had their names, home addresses, Social Security numbers, and dates of birth exposed when that data was transferred to a non-Department of Defense-accredited data center by a contract employee as part of a budget analysis. An Army National Guard spokesperson described it as “more of a...

An unknown number of frustrated Skype customers have been pestered by spoof messages on the Microsoft service for weeks, but the company is yet to close what appears to be a gaping hole in its software. Instead, Redmond has advised Skype users to change their account passwords. But complaints are building up about the lack of communication coming out of the Microsoft camp regarding what seems to be a Skype security flaw. The problem first...

Spam levels have fallen to below 50 percent of all email sent for the first time in a decade, security firm Symantec says. The milestone comes from a 1.8 percent decline in spam rates from last month, when spam accounted for 51.5 percent of sent email. Threat bod Ben Nahorney says it is the lowest rate since September 2003. "There is good news this month on the email-based front of the threat landscape," Nahorney says...

The Morrisons employee accused of stealing and emailing the company’s entire 100,000 payroll database to journalists in 2014 did so because he bore a grudge over an unusual disciplinary misunderstanding. According to the prosecution representing Morrisons at the Bradford Crown Court trial, 43 year-old Andrew Skelton decided to publish the database containing employee names, addresses, bank account numbers and national insurance numbers, in revenge for being incorrectly disciplined for receiving packages at the company’s head...

Hacking Team had developed an Android app that could dynamically execute malware payloads, and appeared within Google's Play store as an innocuous news app, Trend Micro has said. The app, BeNews, only requested three permissions from a user when installed, and was able to avoid Google's automated app checks as no exploit was contained within its code, the security firm said. "The fake news app was downloaded up to 50 times before it was removed...